As we begin 2026, looking back over the year gone by offers some important lessons to supply chain leaders. The many ups and downs, rapid shifts and geopolitical pressures have brought into sharp focus the key role the supply chain plays in keeping just about any industry afloat.
Specifically, a strong use of tariffs in dealmaking by the U.S., China’s tightening of export controls on critical materials and conflict in various regions such as East Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe have disrupted the supply chain in different ways at various intervals throughout the year. From rapidly finding and onboarding new suppliers to trading with different regions in order to avoid tariffs and rerouting of goods, it’s been a complicated year for the supply chain.
Related Stories
In addition to these physical threats to stability, cybersecurity has also climbed to the top of the supply chain manager agenda as a result of high profile incidents in 2025, such as the attacks on Collins Aerospace’s Muse software which grounded flights from airports across Europe to the Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which impacted the company’s whole automotive supply chain after a forced shutdown of production lines across the U.K., India, Brazil and Slovakia.
Procurement and logistics concerns now are high on the corporate agenda. Here are 10 of the most important trends we expect to see in 2026:
- Investing in new technologies: digital-twin models of supply chains will become increasingly popular as they can help reduce risk. They simulate disruptions, optimize inventory, and stress-test sourcing scenarios, a requirement that has become all too critical. IoT sensors will be increasingly integrated to support real-time tracking of goods, equipment and environmental conditions across warehouses and transport routes, while cloud-based supply-chain platforms will be leveraged to share this intelligence with the whole network of manufacturers, logistics providers and suppliers.
- AI tools: GenAI and Agentic AI have made a real splash in 2025 but next year businesses will be looking to develop orchestrators to help manage automated processes and information flows into dynamic, streamlined decision making.
- Data quality: To unlock the potential of AI, businesses will need to invest in getting their data ship-shape. Advanced AI systems are only as good as the data they are trained on, so if businesses want to automatically model the cost impact of new tariff schedules, classify goods for customs, optimize routing decisions, and flag compliance risks they will need to focus on data quality, governance and integration.
- Tariffs: tariff changes will continue to buffet global markets as countries retaliate with their own measures of export control and put pressure on critical industries such as aerospace, defense and renewable energy. Manufacturers in particular will need to build more resilience into their networks to ensure they are able to pivot rapidly and grasp nascent opportunities before the competition.
- China-plus-one strategies: to be more flexible and resilient companies will continue to reduce
dependence on single large off-shore suppliers such as China. As a result, many more new suppliers and the new routes will need to be vetted and onboarded at speed without sacrificing compliance, cost and sustainability.
- Domestic infrastructure: in 2026, the U.S. supply-chain footprint is likely to expand domestically as companies try to avoid tariff pressures. Production, warehousing and supplier capacity will thus be moved to the US, exacerbating well-known domestic issues such as labor shortages; ageing transport infrastructure; and high energy and freight costs. US companies will therefore compete to scale domestic supply-chain capacity efficiently.
- Regulatory compliance: For businesses choosing to regroup domestically, increased regulatory scrutiny will need to be factored in. For example, OSHA enforcement is intensifying around warehouse safety, while new proposed federal rules will increase the material traceability requirements for EV battery material such as cobalt, lithium and nickel. A greater compliance burden means a more transparent supply chain is urgently needed.
- Circular and sustainable processes: Product life cycles are increasingly coming under scrutiny with more and more demand for industry to recover materials and design products that can be recycled or upcycled. As businesses get serious about managing returns more efficiently, tracking asset utilization, measuring environmental impact and facilitating component recovery, platforms and solutions to support these processes will become increasingly popular.
- Cybersecurity: AI has become an attractive target for cyber criminals. The JLR attack revealed the full impact of a breach on the whole partner networks, alerting the supply chain to the need to urgently improve their security measures and include security by design in all their future AI-driven infrastructure or application development.
- The events of 2025 revealed both how critical and how fragile the global supply chain is. Supply chain management and procurement have thus been raised to greater strategic importance.
From ensuring compliance and sustainability, to developing more cost-effective and innovative products or improving brand trust and building long-term resilience, businesses have come to understand that supply-chain performance plays a key role in revenue growth. 2026 will be a year of implementation, testing and preparation to address the challenges met in 2025.
As chief engineering officer, Eric Lefebvre sets and oversees technology strategy for Jaggaer. With more than 25 years’ experience leading technology teams, he is a strong proponent for establishing a corporate vision and then providing his teams with the room to work, ensuring they have the freedom to tap into their full potential.
Eric has a wealth of experience leading teams throughout his career that focused on critical, high-volume transactions. Most recently, Lefebvre was the CTO at Sovos, a global provider of e-Invoicing compliance and 1099 reporting services. He also served as CTO of Fiserv’s core payment acceptance business unit where he led a global organization supporting the world’s largest payment card processing volumes.
